THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

I’m rushing to get ready for a Maritime Humanities conference in Buzzards Bay and also copy-editing an essay for this summer’s PMLA, but oceanic thoughts from last weekend’s SAA in Boston are still churning. I’ve been beat to the blog by my medievalist guest, which isn’t really surprising, but there’s some treasure left down on that salty bottom. Let’s see if I can dive down to it.

SAA seminars are among my favorite academic events. Pre-circulating the papers, which all seminars do, and exchanging responses beforehand, which most do, means that you come to the event already part of a dynamic exchange, and the trick is to move everything forward. The two hours’ traffic of the seminar needs to make contact with all the distinct projects but not get bogged down by re-hashing material we’ve already covered in our e-exchanges. I used personal introductions, a hand-out, and a parlor game.

When we introduced ourselves around the table I asked, at this risk of bringing sentiment into scholarly life (!), for personal connections to the sea. I’m fascinated by the stories that flowed forth, from paternal stories of the navy to assorted maritime engagements and adventures. I talked about open water swimming. It took a fair amount of time to get all these stories out, more than if we’d just given names & academic homes, but that quick dip into our imaginative oceans primed us to think personally about the academic material that followed.

The parlor game involved me giving each seminar member a maritime term or phrase that has entered common speech — “from stem to stern” “doldrums” “aloof” “the bitter end” — and asking each participant to smuggle that word into our discussions, at which point the word-smuggler would triumphantly cast the printed term into the center of the seminar table. We never got to part two of this exercise, reflecting on how these words might represent or capture the deep interplay of metaphor and technical reality in the way we talk about the sea, but it was great fun. It also helped us make transitions, which can be awkward at these things. I used my phrase, “back and fill,” to shift us out of autobiographical maritime reflections and into Carl Schmitt’s Anglo-centric vision of maritime empire.

The seminar outline offered to a few general questions — Schmitt and empire, Glissant and the beach, an assortment of oppositions including metis/intellect, beach/whirlpool, and surface/depth — to get ideas circulating without tying them too explicitly to specific papers. We concluded, perhaps too easily, that we don’t like neat oppositions, though I also wonder if the desire to connect or blur oppositions isn’t in its own way as oversimplifying as the binaries themselves. The trick may be finding a way to think meaningfullly about difference and connection at the same time.

My job when navigating the 13 great papers and fantastic contributions of two non-Shakespearean respondents was keeping us off rocky shores, so my notes on the seminar outline aren’t terribly coherent. Some great stuff about cultural differences across different ocean basins, esp the Med / Atlantic / Pacific, and also the fresh/salt/estuary relationship — what to call it? A binary plus one? One interesting thing about estuaries is that their salinity changes with the tide and also with wind and weather, so they are perfect places to interrogate the fresh/salt distinction. There’s a way, as I was thinking some time ago, that this distinction maps onto local/global concerns: all fresh water questions are basically local, while salt water circulates globally.

The question of Shakespeare as such, interestingly and perhaps reveallingly, never really came up. Plenty of papers took up non-Shax-y topics and authors, and several seminarians used Shakespeare as a stalking horse for big questions about theatricality or ecology or the historical changes that accompany early modernity. Jeffrey Cohen hid his Bard-o-skepticism until he wrote his blog posts, where he has generous things to say about the whole event.

After the seminar, the rest of SAA was a blur of bars & plenaries, not always in that order. I very much liked the primatology panel with Holly Dugan & Scott Maisano, and thought the Fri morning plenaries were a bit bland in their admiration of all things SAA. Or perhaps I’m just no longer used to closing the bar, which makes me a bit cranky at a 9 am lecture!

I’m especially grateful to my two guest-interlopers, Jeffrey Cohen and Joe Blackmore, whose contributions did what I’d hoped they would do, stretching our discussion chronologically and linguistically and imaginatively. All academic conferences, even international ones like SAA, tend toward in-group parochialism, esp when our shared subject so often gets claimed as “not of an age, but for all time.” The idea of the seminar was not really to substitute “ocean” for “Shakespeare” in an all-embracing way, but to seek out fluid metaphorics — flows instead of spaces — that might enable us to deal with vastness and distance in different ways.

So — a new big thing for Oceanic Shakespeares? I’m not sure yet. But certainly wide horizons and strong winds blowing.

When I saw the cover-page review in the Times Book Review, this seemed an obvious novel to read just before “Oceanic Shakespeares.” It’s a sailing and prep-school story, and while I don’t always love the latter, the sailing-language in this book is fresh and precise:

You never sail with one wind. Always with three. The true, the created, and the apparent wind: the father, son, and Holy Ghost. The true wind is the one that can’t be trusted. The true wind comes in strong from one direction, but then the boat cuts through the air and creates her own headwind in turn. (39)

The plot, in a way that may be so familiar it goes unremarked in in the two reviews I’ve read, limns The Tempest. Our hero is Jason Prosper, master-sailor, wind-seer, and young man with a dark past. His sailing partner & best friend Cal — surely we don’t need to spell out the remaining syllables? — has committed suicide, which leads Prosper to a new school, where he finds Aidan — the name means fire, not air, but it seems close enough — a magical California spirit. A familiar trio.

The best parts press hard against the metaphorics of sailing. Jason almost drowns his prospective new partner on the first practice of the season, quits the team for the fall, then returns in spring. That plot seems rote enough, but the book’s more interested in connections —

Knots are a form of control. The halyards, sheets, painter, and lines all run because of knots…. ‘The funny thin about a knot,’ [Jason] said, ‘is that it actually weakens the rope.’ (168).

When I read the Times review I wanted to play the etymology game that the author made me wait til almost the very end of the book to find:

We’d see who could come up with the most common words, sayings, and cliches that came from sailing. ” Batten down the hatches,” “give a wide berth,” taken aback,” “above-board,” “true blue,” “high and dry,” “hand over fist,” “know the ropes,” three sheets to the wind,” “walk the plank,” “catch my drift,” “on an even keel,” “loose cannon,” “miss the boat,” “chew the fat,” “let the cat out of the bag,” “no room to swing a cat,” “beat a dead horse,” “shake a leg,” “slush fund,” “cut and run,” “close quarters,” “deep six,” “scuttlebutt,” “chockablock,” “the cut of your jib”… (273)

The title comes from a term Cal invents to fill out this list —

…it means the right sea, the true sea, or like finding the best path in life. It’s deep. I’m telling you, it’s going to catch on. By this time next year, everyone will be using it. (274)

As that last quotation shows, this debut novel risks sentimentality, in the way that writing about near-children sometimes lets you get away with. (It reminds me a bit of The Hunger Games, another first-person teen novel that really has caught on.) Or is it writing about sailing that enables sentimentality? That deep sea of feeling?

I’ve been thinking about shipwreck and other oceanic matters while reading the papers and responses for what looks like a great SAA seminar coming up in Boston in two weeks.

Since I have just a few free hours this week, I thought I might return to an article that’s not due until late April, but which sings the same salty chorus. This chapter will eventually be part of the intro to the shipwreck book, though I first wrote this material for a great conference at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in fall 2010.

My Body is the Hull; the Keele my Back; my Neck the Stem; the Sides are my Ribbes; the Beames my Bones; my flesh the plankes; Gristles and ligaments are the Pintells and knee-timbers; Arteries, veines and sinews the serverall seames of the Ship; my blood is the ballast; my heart the principall hold; my stomack the Cooke-roome; my Liver the Cesterne; my Bowels the sinke; my Lungs the Bellows; my teeth the Chopping-knives; except you divide them, and then they are the 32 points of the Sea-card both agreeing in number…[i]

That manic voice insisting that human bodies and wooden ships occupy the same space is Richard Younge, from his broadsheet The State of a Christian (1636), a single-page work that also appears as a preface to Henry Mainwaring’s Sea-man’s Dictionary (1644). Its mania suggests how intensely and how physically oceanic experience stimulated the early modern imagination. Younge hurls human body parts, Christian souls, and nautical terms together. The resulting conceptual soup provides a frame through which to consider how shipwreck narratives reveal the dynamic meanings of the ocean in early modern English culture. Early modern shipwreck narratives were symbolic performances through which writers tested their own, and their culture’s, experiential knowledge of the ocean. Narratives of maritime disaster lay bare the tremendous practical and symbolic stress that the transoceanic turn created in English habits of orientation. Representations of shipwreck provide a resonant but unfamiliar model of cultural change in early modern English culture. To recast a celebrated modern poetic phrase about the sea, shipwreck is history.[ii]

[i] Richard Younge, “The State of a Christian, lively set forth by an Allegorie of a Shippe under Sayle,” appears as an introduction to Henry Mainwaring, The Sea-Man’s Dictionary, (London: John Bellamy, 1644), sigs. A3 – A3v. The passage is included in some copies of Younge’s The Victory of Patience (London: M. Allot, 1636). It was also published in a single sheet broadside as The State of a Christian (London, 1636).

My favorite of these words is Homer’s, metis, the particular kind of hand-knowledge and skill associated with Odysseus. It includes everything from sailing to boat- (and bed) building, not to mention fast talking. But it’s particularly associated with technical maritime skills and labor. It’s what Conrad calls “craft,” and what he thinks creates a bond among sailors. Some of the best writing I’ve seen on this topic comes in Margaret Cohen’s great recent book, The Novel and the Sea, which I e-reviewed on the Bookfish a little while ago, here. “Experience is better than knowledge” was the line I pulled out from the book, which Cohen took from Samuel Champlain’s manual on seamanship she does such great work with in her first chapter.

I’m wrestling with seamanlike metis, a set of tactics that improvisationally transform disorder into order, in a chapter of the book I’m writing on shipwreck from The Tempest through Robinson Crusoe. The metis chapter focuses on Jeremy Roch, a 17c mariner, amateur poet, and astrologer whose ms. journals are in the Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich — a particularly wonderful place to do maritime research, by the way.

The picture above show’s an exploit Roch is espeically proud of: sailing in a open boat from Plymouth to London with only a boy and a dog, “one as good company as the other to me for any help I had need of,” as he notes.

Here’s a little snippet out of the current draft of the chapter —

Faced with disaster, sailors respond with work. Skilled, technical, hard to understand maritime labor becomes paramount in moments of crisis, which is why these episodes tend to fill with jargon. The Boatswain in The Tempest, whose lines provide the epigraphs for this chapter, provides a familiar example. His language interposes a host of sea-terms – yare, topsail, “room,” topmast, “bring her to try,” “main-course,” among others – alongside his resonant political and philosophic claims. While Shakespeare’s command of sea-terms was imperfect, he recognized the dramatic power of opaque, technical language in moments of crisis. The “cunning intelligence” and skill with technology that The Odyssey calls metis characterizes the core physical response of mariners to shipboard crisis. Metis is both a physical and an intellectual practice; it represents seamanlike labor and also an imaginatively-charged exploration of physical reality. As ships founder and rigging snaps, sailors struggle to maintain orderly forms of action and thought. The order-salvaging task of the sailor resembles the task of the shipwreck writer. Representing the jeitzteit crisis moment in poetic or descriptive language requires matching the physical labors of the mariner with the formal shaping of the writer. Performing metis requires hands, tools, and language.

The burden of the chapter will be to flesh out the connection I assert here between poetic and nautical craft. I’m also wondering if there might be different conceptions of order at work, and if swimming and sailing might be two distinct ways to conceptualize human metis in close connection to the sea.

Specifically the Maelstrom off the coast of Norway but also whirlpools in general. These fairly regular features of the supposedly featureless ocean arise from the interactions of powerful tidal currents around narrow channels. They’re a bit like tidal bores, which show up in rivers and estuaries and feature in a wonderful scene in Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.

Here’s an early modern image of the Maelstrom —

I’m wondering if this oceanic feature can partially displace the beach as our primary physical symbol for land-sea interaction?

Whirlpools, like beaches, get formed when the sea & land come crashing towards each other. Both are structured by tide and time, both are fairly predictable, but mathematically complex. Neither was well understood in the early modern period. The downward force of maelstroms, as Poe reminds us, asks us to think of them as descents into the ocean rather than movements towards land. Homer’s whirlpool has a monster inside it.

Thinking of whirlpools or maelstroms as oceanic forms, features that are in their way as typical of land-sea interaction as the beach or other contact zones helps shift us imaginatively off-shore without entirely forsaking land for deep water. The whirlpool is an inhuman and inhospitable place, but it’s still created by land, at least in part. It’s not a human contact zone like a beach or a ship, but it’s a site of interaction.

Despite Poe and Jules Verne, coastal maelstroms aren’t strong enough to suck down ships or submarines. But what if we think of them as windows into the ocean?

These thoughts are all leading up to the Oceanic Shakespeares SAA seminar early next month, where all such questions will be resolved.

We’re only three weeks away from SAA, and I’ve been happily swimming through the flood of papers for my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar. In the next few days I’ll be responding to the authors individually, but I also want to explore a few larger questions and structures that the papers point toward as a whole.

The single largest question the seminar raises for me is the relation between the two terms in its title: what might it mean to connect the vast world ocean to the works, diverse and poly-appropriated though they are, of a single author? I’m hoping that this seminar can help us move past Will-centricity, not only by opening up the vast array of other materials available to salty scholars of this period, from Camoens to Haywood to Joost Von den Vondel and many others, but also by pushing literary culture up against what Whitman calls the “crooked inviting fingers” of the surf. We’ll talk in Boston about how this might happen.

But first, some short introductions / questions for each of the three groups of papers.

Wet Globalism:

These papers have me returning to questions of the sea as cultural contact zone, a space both “free” in Grotius’s sense and also endlessly connected. They also make me wonder about nationalism and inter-European rivalries, remembering that Grotius’s Mare Liberum was itself part of the Dutch struggle against Spain; free seas are not apolitical spaces.

I also recently ran into a few lines from everyone’s favorite Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt, that captures an Anglophilic vision of the oceanic globe that we Shakespeareans are perhaps more familiar with from John of Gaunt —

The case of England is in itself unique. Its specificity, its incomparable character, has to do with the fact that England underwent the elemental metamorpho­sis at a moment in history that was altogether unlike any other, and also in a way shared by none of the earlier maritime powers. She truly turned her collective existence seawards and centered it on the sea element. That enabled her to win not only countless wars and naval battles but also something else, and in fact, infinitely more—a revolution. A revolution of sweeping scope, of planetary dimensions. (Schmitt, Land and Sea, Simona Draghici trans.)

I don’t think we need to believe all or even any of that in order to use it to consider the legacy of oceanic English globalism from Shakespeare to Conrad and beyond. But I think it’s worth talking about.

Salty Aesthetics and Theatricality:

This is my sub-section as respondent — Joe Blackmore has Wet Globalism, and Jeffrey Cohen Fresh Water Ecologies — and it’s leading me to my favorite salt-water theorist, Eduoard Glissant, who writes about the sea as a place of “rupture and connection,” and also a “variable continuum” (Poetics of Relation, 151). His vision is also historical; he talks about the slave trade as the defining core of “creolization in the West…the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality” (6). To live in the post-Columbian West, for Glissant, means inhabiting and traversing oceanic space.

The pressure of maritime exchange and metaphor on aesthetic forms makes up the common subtext of this sub-set of papers. Water proves slippery; it’s hard to pin wetness down, on the Shakespearean stage or in anti-theatrical discourse. I wonder if these papers, and the seminar as a whole, might want to push toward some specific suggestions about the aesthetic force of the oceanic: it’s an agent of change, flowing and shifting, a threat to fixity or rigid conceptions of form, but also — and here I think there’s an interesting counter-current in these papers — something that’s mostly not-quite present, at least not fully. Aesthetic forms dive into the ocean but also surface and leave it. We see wet bodies on stage but not the ocean itself.

Fresh Water Ecologies:

The third group wonderfully focuses our attention back to dramatic particularities — two of the three essays are on Hamlet, which I’m currently teaching — and on the function of fluid spaces in eco-political demarcations. The sea and rivers in these essays comprise ecological and political challenges, with the pirate’s legacy looming large in Denmark. Reading several figures from Shakespeare as deeply watery or maritime — Hamlet, Ophelia, Hotspur — these papers connect watery spaces to human experiences. They make me think, as several other papers do also, about plot and principles of narrative connection. Northrop Frye once joked that in Greek romance, shipwreck was the “primary means of transportation.” What happens when we historicize the plot-ocean of classical romance so that it becomes, very literally, the stage of history?

The oceanic structure of the vortex or coastal whirlpool figures in both of the Hamlet papers, though somewhat differently. I wonder if this recurrent feature, produced by the encounter between mobile ocean and steadfast land, might serve as a metaphor for the disruptive but aesthetically patterned consequences of bringing land and sea together. We often think of this encounter in terms of the beach, which Greg Dening has done so much to turn into a rich metaphor for cultural encounters. Vortices have a different, less friendly aesthetic; they are less human places. We might be able to do something with them.

One of the atypical things about this SAA seminar will be having two respondents who are not (gasp!) Shakespeareans — though I hasten to assure everyone that they aren’t double agents or marketers for Hollywood films. Instead they work in cognate disciplines, and I’ve asked them aboard to try to stretch our Shakespearean and oceanic thinking.

Josiah Blackmore is Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Studies at the U of Toronto. A specialist in early modern Iberian literatures, he has written two great books with maritime resonances: Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minnesota, 2002), and Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa (Minnesota, 2009). I met Joe first through reading Manifest Perdition, and then later we both presented at a wonderfully intense small conference on shipwreck in London in 2010. There I heard a snippet of his new work, on Portuguese poetry, maritime expansion, and innovations of “depth.”

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Professor of English and Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute (MEMSI) at George Washington U. He’s written too many books and articles to list here, though Monster Theory (Minnesota, 1996), Of Giants (Minnesota 1999), and Medieval Identity Machines (Minnesota, 2003) will provide a good sense of the work. More recent snippets can be found on his group blog, In the Middle. I’m pretty sure I first met Jeffrey via his e-avatar(s), which produce a lively discursive flow, though I also recently found him hanging around New York City.

The directions that I’m hoping Joe and Jeffrey will stretch us should be fairly obvious; we can perhaps escape the twin prisons of chronological early modernity and Anglophone monolingualism by attending to their work and responsive voices. Less directly, I also hope that their presence with us will make our engagements less “in group” and more expansive.

I’m looking forward to reading our shared bibliography by Dec 1. Please limit yourself to 2 or 3 items you think might be useful for other seminar members, remembering that none of us has time for dozens of new sources. What are the select few things that you think everyone working on oceanic matters should read?

I’ve not pruned my list yet, but I’m thinking about Chris Connery, Edouard Glissant, and Charles Olson. Fiction, poetry, and non-early modern works are all welcome in our great salt sea.

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Congratulations to literature scholar, digital humanities innovator, and two-time @NEH_ODH grantee Dr. Katherine Rowe, named the new president of the College of @williamandmary. https://t.co/EFDCzeKEX5